For the record, I dislike instant messaging. Maybe I’m old school about this, but I don’t like the idea that someone can randomly interrupt what I’m doing while I’m in the middle of typing or doing something intricate on the screen with the mouse. Yes, even if it’s my girlfriend. That’s in addition to random bling noises happening, or even worse, something worse popping up on my screen.
That being said, I tried sending a TV show to P–. I have a TV tuner card installed into my home computer. It’s possible to set the TV tuner to act as the video input for the web cam feature of Yahoo messenger. The hardest part was trying to change the channel — it insisted on setting the channel to public access every time it was activated. I had to start up the TV program to get to the channel switcher, then go back to Yahoo and fiddle with the screen size until the soundtrack kicked in. P– was able to watch Emeril with me.
That with using the included Snapstream (aka “BeyondTV”) software, tv viewing anywhere over the Internet is a reality. The video quality is not so hot – upstream on DSL is not much better than using a modem — but it works.